22 Examples of Internal Risks

John Spacey, May 21, 2022

Internal risks are risks that are fully within your control. These exist at the level of an organization, department, team or project. For example, a project might view the risk that the business strategy behind the project could fail as an external risk because this is beyond the control of the project team. However, this could be an internal risk to the organization as strategy originates with management. The following are common examples of internal risks.

Audit Risk	Compliance Risk
Control Risk	Cost Risk
Detection Risk	Estimate Risk
Governance Risk	Health & Safety Risk
IT Risk	Inherent Risk
Innovation Risk	Model Risk
Operational Risk	Performance Risk
Process Risk	Program Risk
Project Risk	Quality Risk
Residual Risk	Resource Risk
Schedule Risk	Strategy Risk

The designation of a risk as internal is all about context. If something is mostly within your control, it is internal. For example, governance risk is internal to an organization but isn't internal to a project.

Internal Risk vs External Risk

Internal risks are fully within your control. External risks are substantially beyond your control. It would be incorrect to think that risks are either internal or external. The vast majority of risks are partially under your control and partially beyond your control. As such, the distinction between internal and external risk isn't always useful and is only used in specialized domains such as project management whereby people want to focus on managing the risks that are fully controllable. For example, project managers aren't typically concerned with whether a project produces business results but rather whether the project delivers to its commitments in areas such as budget, schedule, functionality and quality.

Managing External Risk

External risks aren't fully within your control but they are certainly manageable. For example, the competitive risks that your competition will improve their products can be managed by improving your own products.

Overview: Internal Risks
Type	Business Issues
Definition	Risks that are fully within your control.
A Type Of	Project Risk
Related Concepts	Business Issues » Risk Types » Risk Management » Project Risk »